Tag: chester

November is the start of the truly busy time for craft fairs, artisan markets and most notably for myself, the Chester Arts Fair. This will be my third outing with a Deepbridge sponsored arts fair and hand on heart i have to say i just love them. You are guaranteed a very healthy footfall, fabulous art work from truly great artists who are all very friendly and you are guaranteed to find something to buy at reasonable prices. If you fancy visiting, Christmas gifts and all that, i have added a ticket to my Facebook page that you can download for free and this will give you free entrance in to the Arts Fair.

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Dipping your big toe into the Craft Fair pond is ok if you are prepared to put in the time and money, stand behind a table all day and not make any where near enough to live on. I have dipped my big toe in the Craft Fair pond, found the traders very friendly but the shoppers very tight with their money.

I have 2 VIP tickets and 10 weekend tickets for those who REBLOG this post. Good luck.
If you are trying to make a living out of your art it is quite disheartening when shopper after shopper looks through your work, has a chat and then walks away empty handed, no matter how hard you try to sell them one of your fabulous photos. Looking around there are various options open to you, give up, carry on as you are, look for exhibition space or go for bigger more prestigious art fairs.
I decided to ‘have a go’ at the Liverpool Contemporary Art Fair, nestled among the galleries and established artists from all over the world and it was great! As it is a ticketed event you knew that who ever stopped by your stand was actually in the market for some new wall art and had the ready cash burning a hole in their wallets. The fair prints the tickets, has the website, hires the space and stands, invites the VIP’s and you use your social media to advertise and turn up.
That’s why we decided to do another and signed up for the Chester Art Fair.Chester Arts Fair

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I love Chester Zoo, its one of my favorite places to go and i try to go each summer. We, as a family, visit the zoo where ever we are on holiday and we have been to quite a few over the past few years. We have enjoyed Longleat, Twycross, Knowsley safari park, south lakes wildlife park, New forest wildlife park to name a few. But you cant help compare them all to Chester zoo. We introduced a friends husband who came all the way from Tenerife, unfortunatley we went on one of the worst days of the summer and he renamed the zoo Chester Loo as we seemed to stop off at every toilet in the zoo 🙂 and hardly saw any of the animals as they were sheltering from the rain. Any way i digress, THIS time we had a gorgeous sunny day, the zoo has had a good breading year and we managed to see the tiger cubs, baby elephants and rhino, we didn’t see the cheetah cubs unfortunately but there were plenty of other animals to see.

Last week, we ditched the kids and wandered off to Chester, i thought i might like to take some photos of Chester Cathedral and its stained glass. When we finally managed to find a parking space, £15 at Northgate, what a laugh, big buildings going up, what happened to the bus station? We wandered down through the town center and stumbled across a great little music shop, Back Alley Music, we went in as you do when you have a child who thinks he’s a rock god, and found a great little amp for his birthday gift. Of course i didn’t have enough money on me there and then and was ‘forced’ to go back a few days later with the rock god and got stung for a guitar too :$ Any way off track a bit there. After browsing we went to the cathedral, its beautiful but did you know you have to PAY to get in? Well indignation and other things stopped us from visiting his holiness in his own house, a bit disappointing though. YES i KNOW they have to make money for the up keep of the cathedral but it still is not going to make me pay, so we went next door to the church and had lunch, yes we paid there but we got a full tummy out of it, and i got a couple of lovely stained glass windows out of it too, mission accomplished! We then had a meander and met a nice man selling his art by the clock, he draws/paints local scenes and sticks Dr. Who and his Dalek’s in them, great fun! I took some photos of the outside of the cathedral, that’s free, of the shop’s, also free and we had an enjoyable day out together. http://www.cityofchester.org/

I have processed some of he images using HDR, i bracketed some and used photomatix to process them, others are just a single image i have run through photoshop or photomatix.